Jan

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Digital Design on a Recession Budget

January 30, 2009 | Leave a Comment

As the only marketing person hired by my company, many times, I’m also the graphic designer. Designing brochures, flyers, web pages, and html email is fun. But, it can also be challenging if your marketing budget does not allow you to purchase full-blown graphic software used by industry professionals. Fortunately, I’ve found some alternatives.

Open source is the way to go. There are a few powerful OS programs out there that can do what you need them to do. Here are four programs (completely free!) that have proven useful for my basic design needs:

Photo Manipulation

Don’t want to pay 700 dollars for Adobe Photoshop? Try Gimp. This open source software has many of the features that Photoshop uses. Cropping, adding text to photos, and creating images from other graphics. Gimp is very user-friendly and intuitive -especially if you are already used to Adobe products.

Vector-Based Drawing Tool

No everyone can afford to blow their marketing budget on Adobe Illustrator. However, Inkscape is a powerful vector-based graphic program that will probably do the trick for the marketing needs of most small to medium businesses. Inkscape opens and saves .EPS files -a useful feature when you work with professional printers.

HTML Editor

When I was a web designer, Dreamweaver was my program of choice. Not much of a code person, I like the visual WYSIWYG platforms. A nice little compact mini version of Dreamweaver is called Nvu. Like Dreamweaver, Nvu lets you alternate between source code view and user-friendly WYSIWYG view. This program has come in really handy when I need to create a web form or even a quick html email newsletter.

Blogging / CMS

Of course, don’t forget about good old WordPress. This is one of my favorite blogging software programs and its completely free and very powerful. If you are looking for a news blog for your company web site, there is no need to pay your web designer for a custom-built version. WordPress blogs are increasingly SEO friendly and provide you with the capability of creating an entire web site.


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